AFAICT the whole ‘corporate personhood’ or ‘legal entity’ status was a direct result of various local and state governments making willy-nilly arbitrary rules and laws against a corporation who did business within their borders. Think Folsom County making a law that all international corporations have to pay 10% of their income to the church while locally owned businesses were immune to the ruling.
Not judging the morality of this but just stating what I believe is the source of this policy.
Ownership means the right to control a resource. If you are a Google shareholder, does that give you the right to enter their office building? No. You don’t have the (direct) right of control. The officers, hired by the directors (who are elected by shareholders) themselves hire managers, who have direct control over the corporation’s resources. This is nothing more than a divided type of control. Just because the shareholder is called “the owner” by the state’s classifications is meaningless. You could also call a creditor “the owner” because they have a right to be repaid out of corporate assets. You could call the managers “the owner”. The point is not what label the state slaps on it. The point is to find out who is responsible for the tort of an employee. To do this, you need a careful, Austrian-informed, libertarian-compatible theory of causation–and a careful application of it to a given situation. The anti-corporate zealots never even attempt this.
Why is this? If my tree falls on you, why is it my fault? Why don’t you watch where you’re going? I don’t think it’s obvious that an owner is resonsible for damage “his property causes.” In fact, property does not cause damage in the legal sense. Only people cause damage–by their actions. If my tree falls on you, the question is: Did I damage you, using my tree as the means? Or did you just have bad luck or were negligent yourself? Etc. Again, one needs a coherent and well-developed theory of causal responsibility to even begin to address these issues.
Asserting that owners are responsible for harm “caused by” their property is just that–an unsupported assertion. And accepting the state’s classification of the stockholder as an “owner” is no way to make a libertarian argument.
In any event–if the FedEx truck driver negligently harms someone, it is not property that causes the harm (the truck might even be owned by the driver); it is the action by the driver. Why is a person A who bought a share of stock for $20 from person B, liable for torts committed by a negligent driver employed by the company in which A owns stock? You just keep assuming this. Why is he responsible. Does he own the driver?
Sure, transportation costs should not be subsidized and eminent domain etc. is unlibertarian. Surely the way an economy is arranged would be different in some ways absent the state. This in no wise means that production would all be local. This is a silly superstition.
Ah, so then, we agree, ownership of shares does not actually constitute ownership of the assets, and as such, the destruction of those assets are not the destruction of your assets, and you have no claim against the vandal.
If you read the last part of the very sentence you quoted, it says “whether it is they that directly employ/control it or their agents”. Just to make it perfectly clear, I mean only in cases of abuse or negligence should any monetary damages be expected. If you are walking on my property, even with my permission, and walk into an unconcealed pit, that’s your clumsy butt’s fault.
If you really look at my argument, it is actually my assertion that he is not responsible, because he has no right of control. The driver should be able to drive off with his FedEx truck and keep it. The shareholders are not responsible for it, and have no claim to it.
What other method do you propose for transportation so cheap that local, small-scale production will be more expensive than distant, massive production? If it costs you $0.10 to build a widget but $1.00 to get it to your customer, but a local producer can build it for $1.00 with negligible transportation costs, people will favor the local producer. He will also have the advantage of being better-known, more trusted, more able to be held accountable for defects.
Beyond that, I find it dubious that the massive layers of bureaucracy and organization in large corporations, with those who produce the least often making the most money, should be seen as assuredly more efficient than small-scale production. Indeed, much evidence is to the contrary.
If I were to park my big rig on a hill and use a bag of sugar to keep it from rolling into the school it wouldn’t be my fault all those kids were killed, it was the fault of the ants who ‘stole’ all my sugar. I didn’t kill all those kids using my truck as the means, it was just bad luck that the ants were hungry today.
I don’t think a tree has ever ‘just fallen’ in the history of the world, there is always some external force that causes it. If one doesn’t ‘properly secure’ their tree and it falls over into the neighbor’s house you just can’t blame the wind or an ‘act of god’ for the damages and chalk it up to ‘bad luck’ but the person who is ultimately responsible for the ‘actions’ of the tree which would be the owner of the tree is at fault.
Don’t like it, cut it down and be done with it.
The whole right to not have your property ‘aggressed’ against by the actions (or inactions) of others.
It makes no sense using violence to acheive libertarian aims when violence is exactly what we advocate getting rid of. The leftists using violence to acheive their ends makes far more sense because their ends is not liberty, but equality.
It’s silly to attack anything that has benefitted from the state, because where is the line drawn? Is it correct to assassinate workers of the state? How about corporations that have benefitted from state intereference in the market? Or is the line drawn at smashing up property? How about welfare recipients? It may just be that there are ordinary citizens that have benefitted from the state unknowingly.
And even if the state disappeared in a puff of logic tomorrow morning, we’d be left with all the roads and so on that the state built. The lefties seem to think they should be destroyed and then they get to decide how things would have been if the state had never existed, and implement that instead. Crazy.
You can reasonably foresee that using a bag of sugar to keep a truck from rolling downhill is liable to fail. If you have some reason to expect the tree to fall, you should secure it, but under normal circumstances you don’t have any reason to expect trees to fall.
Well, right, but do the roads become commons, or are they claimed by individual owners? If it is the former, good luck getting a group of disparate people to agree on who should maintain it, especially since the state, which currently compels taxes, can’t seem to keep them repaired. If it’s the latter, it is near-inconceivable that a road of any great length will stay intact.
If an individual could prove that part of the land on which the road was built was taken by eminent domain, wouldn’t he have the most legitimate claim?
I see two issues here. First are corporations legitimate targets of violence in a revolution? As I answered before JC is correct that corporations are legitimate targets. Imagine the most obvious example of the defense contractor for the governement. During a revolution the factory manufacturing the means of your oppression is a legtimate target. It would not seem realistic that all corporations would be legtimate targets as it is relevant the degree the corporation is a tool of the state’s coercion. Everyone who has some intereaction with the state should not be assumed to be an enemy of freedom.
The second issue is would groups of people form entities like corporations without state intervention. The answer is clearly yes and at the very least I can see no reason why it should be prohibited with violence in a free society. There are lots of advantages to this type of entity irrespective of the state’s protection. The question for you JC is would entities like business groups/corporations in a free society be attacked by you?
Most roads would go to HOAs. I don’t see the problem in maintaining them. Some would be bought up by corporations, and others would fall into utter disuse, because they’d be unnecessary.
I’m curious, how many of you have read Kinsella’s paper on causality? Or his work on the corporation? Because what he’s arguing on here stems from these works, and it made a lot more sense to me once I read his papers on the matter. Macy’s, of all corporations, hardly seems a fair target to me; what has it done wrong? Availed itself of state services? Well who doesn’t? Is Macy’s a firm that clamours for intervention? If not, why is it a legitimate target? It’s not Blackwater. Otherwise, anyone who avails themselves of the state’s “benefits” is a legitimate target, and what we have is a war of all against all. Specific corporations might be legitimate targets. Not all.
As for dealing with a firm that has Inc or Ltd. in its name, this is a clear sign that the firm is a LLC., so there’s really no excuse in this case to ignore its warning that it is a limited liability corporation. Don’t do business with an LLC. if you disapprove of it.
I disagree, there are many reasons why violence would persist in a libertarian society. One could call cutting down a tree violence. What we are against is using aggressive force against a person or their property. What I am trying to establish is that corporate assets are the property of no person, and so are available for claiming by anyone who comes along and does so.
No, they would not be. Indeed, I don’t attack them now! The time is not right. An entity that would be like a corporation to whatever degree is sustainable in a truly free society would not be attacked, because direct ties of ownership would be maintained between the assets and shareholders.
Why? Why don’t I just get the patch of road in front of my house? What if I don’t wanna join yer darn HOA?
I’ve looked at his work on the corporation. He referenced it earlier in the discussion, and if you look through my previous posts, some of the points I’ve disputed come directly from that work.
Straw men. People keep trying to hit me on this, and it isn’t the point. The point is NOT whether we have a good motive to attack Macy’s, for instance, but whether attacking Macy’s assets is actually aggression against a person. I maintain that it is not. That is the whole of my argument. To my mind, your argument is equivalent to arguing whether or not I should break a dead twig on the ground.
Who made you the High Holy Norm-Declarer for society?
Ah, and what I actually mean is that attacking Macy’s corporate assets is aggression against nobody’s property, and so is not what is forbidden in Libertarian philosophy. The act is without inherent moral content.
There are some issues related to liabilities with corporations in a free society. For example a trucking company may have accidents with people with whom it has no relationship. In these instances the offended party has not agreed to any limited liability. I think there is just no way to get around these issues and we have to accept that we live amongst other people and that it is impossible for everyone to be in complete agreement regarding what liability will be universally accepted and agreed upon. Most things will be generally accepted but it will not be universal.
I’m sure you could have a patch of road if you wanted it. But I was speaking about what is likely, and by dint of economic efficiency, HOAs are best suited to manage or even own roads.
Who said there are no owners, though? Ownership is simply spread out, as Kinsella elucidated. There’s no “fictional” entity owning anything.
Must be the same force that made you that. If you do business with the firm, knowing it’s an LLC, what real excuse do you have for protesting its status? Not much, really. No one forced your hand to do business with it.
ML, I don’t disagree - but I am referring to patrons of LLCs.